


Lance's Amazing and Indomitable Courage

by trashwalkeralec



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst?, Gen, I RESPECT Lance, Langst, Voltron, Warm up that got out of hand for a bit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-15 01:06:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11795238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trashwalkeralec/pseuds/trashwalkeralec
Summary: Red Lion is damaged and Lance is hurt after facing off against a fearsome ship. Lance reflects.





	Lance's Amazing and Indomitable Courage

Raid sirens blared,  
_Citizens of Sol'onomas. Do not deviate from your designated schedules. Martial law is in effect. The enemy fleet has jumped into the system. The power of the Imperial Galactic Fleet and the fruit of its brightest minds, the Gravitic Well Generator, stands ready to face them. Hail Emperor Zarkon. Repitza. That is all._

•••••

Lance dreamed he could touch the stars. Gentle orbs of light sailed past him with immaculate grace, glowing pale and blue and orange in the void. There was nothing but him, those stars, and the timeless, yawning abyss of deepest black beneath.

_I could reach out, and grab one_

He did, but as his gloved hand moved to close around the star a sharp sting coiled through his arm and back and hips, grinding his nerves into a sudden shocked numbness that left him gasping.

Lance was hurting, broken somewhere. _I could close my eyes_ , he thought, _dream of nothing just for a moment, and it won't hurt anymore. Not even a little. When I get up I'll feel fine. Fineee. I'll walk to the pier, and I'll stretch,_

_No,_

The thought felt strangely hot. _No_. Lance knew that was wrong. He hadn't seen the pier in years. He remembered his fists, clenched around Red's controls in impotent rage. But he'd seen the rolling grey foam of the waves, like smoke, the beach at night, just... before bed? A moment ago? Yesterday? A year? A hundred?

The stars burned with voices. "Annoying," they murmured over him.

Those floating past whispered "dumb, dumb, dumb"

 _No, no, stop, I'm not, I'm not,_ he begged. I'm more than that, _I've tried so hard_ , but they would not stop, and no matter how he begged the nightmare would not end.

 _Please_ , he tried to say, but a very real knot formed in his throat. His voice would not make a sound, except for that of a hot rasp.

The stars spoke with six voices, "pathetic".

Lance shivered.

When he forced himself to rise, to wake and shake off the voices, to tell his mother of the dream and his determination to never dream again, his boots touched nothing, he spun, weightless, and his starved lungs and mind gave out at the sudden movement. The stars dimmed and all the lights drained down into the inky depths, taking him with them.

Lance dreamed, of home. Of beaches flecked with gold. Of waves of sunlight, across the street. His reflection greeted from the windows of parked car. Youthful features stared back at him, smeared with fruit juice. The eyes of a child, smiling, kind despite a spark of mischief. He was clad in beach attire.

At noon, heat haze shimmered on the road, but a cool breeze was coming in from the sea, passing gently through the beach. It felt particularly good in the shade of a massive palm tree. Too bad the shade was far away from the life guard.

Lance rested in the shade for a moment, his stomach turning and aching from all the fruit he'd eaten that morning, just as he had so many years ago. Mangos. So many. Some had not even been ripe enough.

Gulls scattered in a clamor of feathers and squawks. Someone else stood behind him, he saw. That was wrong, no one had stood behind when he ate that much fruit. Familiar looking, his face like Lance's but older, a young man in some white, futuristic space suit with blue details. Could it be? No, he was a child.

"Do you remember," said the youth, in a voice that sounded like... like his older brother's? It couldn't be his. "when we heard something in a movie, or a cartoon, 'you have that special spark, that greatest gift for making others laugh'? It made sense at the time."

"I remember." said Lance.

"Do you think it might've been a lie?" There was something terribly sad about the young man's face when he wasn't smiling, like that smile had eroded, it had been worn down and would never come back to its childhood glory. "Who would say something like that?" He continued. "That there's something special about someone who makes others laugh."

Lance didn't know what to say.

In the reflection the young man's gaze didn't waver. He stood, akimbo. "Yea, it has to be one of the cruelest lies there is. No one thinks there's a special spark to people like us. They'll just call us... goofs. Make others laugh and they'll never take you seriously. You'll ask them to, and they'll say 'I know how you are, I'll leave that to someone who I can take seriously'. Then, what are we supposed to do to be taken seriously? What can they make us do for it?"

That couldn't be. A special spark. He'd liked that line... when, when had he heard that? It was an important job. Someone had to make others happy. Someone had to crack the jokes.

Lance saw fists, gloved in that space armor's gloves, clenched hard on Red Lion's controls, in rage. What do you have to do? "What did you do?" Lance demanded to know of himself. "What did you do?"

The paladin smiled a weak smile, which was even worse than an absent one. "Do you think that was rash? The others would've never made in time. None of them are as fast as Red. I thought I had a chance, that I could do it. I could, I was good enough to make it. I would show them. That wasn't the case. How did it come to that?"

_Red..._

His heart sank.

"Do you remember what we wanted from life when we were little?" Lance asked, with the infinite wisdom of a child.

"Yes."

"What was it?"

"To be happy. And make others happy."

"Did we get to?"

Lance, armored in the raiment of a Paladin of Voltron, hesitated.

His stomach lurched as it had done in past. Then world lurched, and all beauty fled.

Tears came to Lances eyes when they finally opened. _Red_. Red was inactive.

_Because of me. I did this._

Her cabin had become un recognizable as a finite space. Dark, eyes closed and inert. Artificial gravity was offline as well. Little blue spheres of flame hung in the air, as such was the nature of fire in an environment of zero gravity, each at the core of its own expanding ball of smoke, like tremendously scaled down versions of primordial star systems. Each consumed some sort of priceless pieces of long lost technology, wiring he would never understand, which was from, Lance could only guess, the damaged display in front of the pilots seat.

 _Red is hurt_ , lance thought as he paddled toward the seat, each painful stroke towards the pilots seat sending the strangely burning nebulas tumbling away into the darkness. His breaths came heavily and his eyes watered, but not from the smoke.

Each of fiber of his being pulsed cold, cold like space, with the dreadful thought that Red might not rise again. His blood had turned into ice. A sob crept into his tortured throat, mounting horror building around his heart as his hands came to cover his mouth, as if to prevent it from spilling out a flood he knew he would never been able to stop, no matter how much it hurt.

Lance might've cried out, yet he realized, he could. He could breathe. He could think clearly. The cabin had become pressurized again.

_Maybe Red isn't,_

That glimmer of hope twisted in his heart, like a dagger.

_Red, it must have been Red_

Ahead, the controls and panels and everything became distinct as a ball of fire passed over them.

Lance hadn't been a proper technician in the academy, but even he knew depressurized cabins did not become pressurized again, nor did fire burn without air, definitely not in the void of space.

He moved as fast as he could, despite the pain smothering his body, leaning over to touch an undamaged section of the control board, as gingerly as one would touched the fevered forehead of a loved one.

_Red, thank you girl. Thank you, even when I brought you here, for all the wrong reasons_

_I'm sorry,_ Lance tried to say, but his voice would not make a sound. Fear had robbed him of any speech.

His voice cracked, "Red,"

Nothing. That hurt the most. Had Red's last wish been for him to live? Lance remembered fists clenched on controls, blinded and possessed by impotent rage. He saw a disparate fleet of rebel ships, forlorn of any hope, faced against a smaller Garla force, led by a technological horror of a battleship.

He hadn't helped find Shiro. What had he done since then? What had he done to be thought of as worthy? What had he done, to save the rebel fleet against the Garla's super-weapon? Had they all died, crushed beneath the horrible power and ingenuity of whatever local warlord had been tasked to crush them, because he had failed? At the time, he thought it would seem foolish no matter what, so it hadn't mattered. The protests of the others hadn't mattered.He had failed, how much could he be worth?

_What did I try to prove? Red, it should be you that is awake, not me. I failed. I should've never been a-_

Ahead, in the everlasting darkness, the display came to red life, and focused on the scene above them, above the moon they had crashed on.

Above, the greatest of the rebel capital ships, the biggest ones, which weren't particularly big, held off Garla cruisers, covering the smaller ships jumping out of the system in orderly fashion. The Garla's lead vessel, an enormous battleship flanked with what Lance through of as veiny, glowing bowls was enveloped in a sphere of smoke on one side, listing out of formation and falling into the atmosphere of the world below. It was trying to maneuver, to bring its over I damaged side to bear.

_Thank you, Red_

A tear rolled down his cheek, cool in the the smoke of the canon. Lance sat in his seat, in the darkness, unable to contain the irresistible pain within him. Another. It was too hard to hold them in. He wept with the sorrow of someone who'd broken before reaching the place where standing tall wasn't necessary and feeling small was an after thought.

He hadn't failed after all. Not yet.

In the void, the Garla battle ship stabilized, trailing debris, and turned towards the remaining vessels, the larger ships and transport craft, its remaining special weapon powering up.

The time for feeling sorry was past. He couldn't break again.

_I know this is a lot to ask Red, but we're not done here. I've crashed many times before, Blue will tell you. We have a job to finish_

A spear of pain bore through Lance as he worked the controls, but he continued, pushing both of them forward because that was what was asked of him. As a paladin. As a pilot of the red lion. There were lives to save. It was what he wanted for every single being in every single Galaxy.

_We have to, Red, for the right reasons this time_

A high pitched whine filled the cabin as the Red lion replied in affirmative, turning the black surfaces of the cabin into a deep veined arterial red. Red rose, roaring, coming to stand with the majesty of a wounded apex predator.

The gravity came back online to the clattering sound of small fragments falling into place behind lance. The smoke was vented with a hiss.

The Garla battle ship was in position, nearly completely powered up once again.

_Did I dream?_

It didn't matter. There would be a time to apologize, and to forgive. There was a task to finish now. He would not die over the moon, nor Red. No one would. He would make sure.

Red leapt off the moon.

•••epilogue•••

The moon over Sol'onomas had never been considered a sacred place. The beauty of the rocky, grey celestial body had made those below raise their eyes toward the sky once, not reverence for a miracle. The warmongers of the Garla empire had never sought to master the natural order of the universe. It was a time of war, and might was shown in the way of tremendous battleships with the power to unleash the fury of a caged star. It was a time of monstrous war engines, and the soulless violence of endless drone armies was the norm.  
Such notions were challenged when. the Invincible Empire turned about and brought to bear, not the most massive of batteries, but the terrible magnificence of a gravitational anomaly over the largest rebel armada the local galaxy had ever seen.   
The effects of the Gravity Well generators spread like a disease, real enough to make every soul aboard every vessel feel like they were sinking. They were. Every vessel assembled against the Garla armada was infected, and they were all supposed to die, crashed upon the surface of a crushed moon. All seventy six thousand ships, and nineteen million lives.  
They hadn't.   
The survivors would go on to describe how a red lance of energy had scythed through the glowing bowl-like weapons of the Invincible Empire at the last moment.

It had looked like a comet. The weapon had activated, but only marginally, leaving behind an anomally too small to sweep away the entire fleet onto a crushed moon, such had been the plan.

The fleet would escape, defeated, but intact. The Garla would never celebrate. The Invincible Empire would be disintegrate in the atmosphere, after the Red Paladin and his Lion had destroyed its remaining gravity generator. They would live on, unlike the Garla battlefleet. It would flee at the arrival of the remaining Paladins, only to be later defeated piecemeal by the rebels during the Seven Tragic Days, as the Garla would come to know them.

At places of devotion in Sol'onomas, the moment the ending began for Garla dominion of the Galaxy would be commemorated in murals, panes showing a red lion leaping over a black, blade-like ship, and in lengthy choruses sung in the world's noblest language, remembering the moon touched by the Red Lion of Voltron, and its courageous Paladin.     
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••


End file.
